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Cold. What would it be like without spring?
Consider the pillaged villages dismembered:
infants litter streets haunted by blank faces.
Consider the disemboweled huts left empty
by floodwaters welled from dammed levees
protecting the ricepaddies of the hacienda.
Consider the forlorn sentry praying for an end
to the war, his craving for absent warmth
and his lovers’ caresses, away from home.
Consider the unanswered pleas of the faithful
whose unfaithful gods mock them at unlit altars,
chants gone stale with murmured fears and pain.
Consider the abiding cold that envelops us,
and pose the echoed question: will spring be back,
will the warblers return to a sleeping forest?
O, the fat daffodil buds will remain on their stalks,
but the orphaned infants’ cry will fade away
into a still night, into the cold of an aborted spring.